


Wildfire

by magickus



Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Blood, Drabble, First Kiss, Heavy Use of Similes and Metaphors, M/M, Oneshot, Psychoanalysis, Unbeta'd, by Edgar, kind of, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 13:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15097520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magickus/pseuds/magickus
Summary: Johnny kisses like he’s fighting a losing battle.Edgar has some thoughts about Johnny.





	Wildfire

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this after an all-nighter and barely glanced over it in editing so it's probably completely incoherent but im ok with that, it's in the spirit of the source material.

Johnny kisses like he’s fighting a losing battle.

Which, Edgar supposes, compared in context to the rest of the poor man’s unfortunate life, makes a perfect fit. Every aspect of Nny is a battle; with society, the system, himself, an unruly plastic seal on a new jug of milk. Intimacy, in all of its unfamiliarities, is no exception. Johnny kisses like he wants to rip Edgar open. He wants to claw and tear and  _ hurt, _  because that is all he knows.

Nny bites hard on his lip. Thick copper floods his mouth and Edgar accepts the punishment. It is part of Nny’s nature to turn to violence, a comfort and familiarity in his own little brutal bubble, a desperate grasp for control. Edgar submits easily, lets his mouth hang open for Johnny to take, to crawl inside and shrug on his piss-poor excuse for a person suit.

As soon as Edgar’s mouth falls slack Johnny reels back, face pinched in an almost comical expression of agony. His thin, chapped lips are streaked red with Edgar’s blood, which should not be as attractive as Edgar finds it, but he is well beyond the point of pretending his tastes are anything but a golden ticket to therapy.

“You stopped,” Johnny growls. His hands, once limp at his sides, come up and wrap around Edgar’s throat. “You stopped. Why the fuck did you stop?” Johnny shakes Edgar fiercely and his glasses slip off his face, blurring Johnny’s edges until he becomes a phantom.

“You were hurting me,” Edgar replies, simple and to the point, the only effective way he learned to communicate with the often-delusional mass murderer that formed the other half of a tentative symbiotic relationship.

Johnny processes this. Edgar can almost hear the dial-up noises from his sleep deprived brain, recalibrating the information once, twice, three times until it  _ finally _ clicks. He seems torn, as he usually does when Edgar complains about his violent tendencies, between consideration for his only friend’s comfort and his gruesome safety blanket of hurt. Nothing can hurt him if he hurts it first. Playground rules. Bloodied lips curl in a snarl. Edgar sighs and maintains his gaze. Johnny did not take well to submission. “You don’t have to fight with me,” he says, “not always. Not with this. There’s nothing to prove, not to me. We can just stop.”

“You want to stop?” An accusation, disguised as an innocent question. Always a minefield with Johnny. In these situations, he found it best to be honest.

“No.” Johnny’s eyes narrow. Dangerous, dangerous. Edgar is contending for a Darwin Award at this rate. “I like to kiss you-- would like to. Again. But what you want is important, if you want to stop.”

All at once, the vice grip on his throat disappears. Edgar winces and rubs the tender, raw skin of his neck. “Want,  _ want _ , always wants. Fucking pathetic, fuck Maslow and his stupid fucking pyramid.” Johnny snaps. He hugs his arms, hunches his shoulders forward, as he usually does when he seeps into melodrama. “It’s disgusting, filthy, animal instincts, manipulation in our synapses by a piece of meat piloting a piece of meat. There’s no control, Edgar, I need control-- fuck, I don’t want to need--”

“Then why did you kiss me?”

Johnny’s rant chokes off into a sort of strangled wheeze. “I don’t know,” he whispers.

There are sharks in the water and they scent blood, but Edgar has to test it. “Would you like to try again?”

Johnny’s lips purse around a closed-mouth scream. Edgar worries he overstepped. This is it, this is the straw that Johnny will remove from the camel and push through his eye socket. He finally crossed that secret, unspoken line marking his life and death at Johnny’s hands.

Instead he surges forward, like the roaring edge of a wildfire. His spidery hands grab Edgar’s face and haul him into a second kiss. Their mouths press together and the blood rushes through Edgar’s ears. His body pulses, a wardrum beat, and he grasps Nny’s shoulders and presses back.

Nny makes a sound like a wounded animal and shivers like one too. His touch gentles from furious to fierce, minuscule to anyone else but it means  _ miles _ to them. Edgar’s tongue traces the seam of his lips and Nny parts his mouth. Nny tastes wrong, like fire and brimstone, cherries and cheese-puffs, and the alcohol burn of ingesting something his body rejects. Nny clutches at the lapel of his coat and the animal fight leaves him in one breath. His wild eyes flutter shut. His body trembles and loosens, his weight falling into Edgar until they both tumble to the floor in a heap.

Edgar pulls back to reorient himself, but Nny is on him again, like a stranded man to water. After starving his body of affection and intimacy for so long, it makes sense that he would be reluctant to part with it.

“Don’t you dare stop,” Nny gasps. His breath is like a hurricane against Edgar’s skin. Nny is a horrible scrapbook of natural disasters. Even his pleas turn into threats. “Don’t let me think, God. Turn it all off. All of it.”

Well, that Edgar can do.


End file.
